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I think, in Pokemon-Amie, the cries are warped a bit. Like how when a Pokemon uses Growl (maybe it's Roar? Or both) its sounds similar but not the same. You can hear Snorlax's "real" cry the first time, then a slightly different one shortly after that. Might also be the case with Zoroark.

But, in the demo battles, it's easy to hear that the cries have been updated to not sound like they're coming out of an original Game Boy anymore.

Oh jeez I didn't even completely watch the video I linked myself. I did hear Snorlax have a slightly different cry when it bounced with happiness after being petted. This is cool! Pokemon can make different cries based on their mood (at least in Pokemon-Amie, anyway). The cry that we heard from Zoroark is after consuming a Pokefood-of-the-region. I'm going to assume that the sent-out battle cry will resemble more its original cry but less shrill and buzzy. I guess it's hard for us to call anymore until the games come out.

Not saying either of you are wrong, but remember, we can't (1 eeveelution) rely (New type) on (Horde battles) prior (3d models) patterns (customizable trainers) to justify why something would or would not be a feature/a part of the game. It's a toss up.

It doesn't seem like it, and I'm starting to think that more people should be kind of worried or unhappy.

So far, the only pokemon that have them are pokemon that don't need them, because they're already pretty strong (somewhere near OU or in ubers) and pokemon that need a regular, permanent evolution (in order to give them better stats and a wider movepool) instead of something temporary that would occur only in battle (Mawile and maybe Kangaskhan and Ampharos).

So, if this trend continues, I can only infer that gamefreak is hellbent on making balance issues even worse, and that I should not buy the game.

Does anybody else here feel even remotely like this, or are you all mindless consumers of videogame media?

If generation six makes the metagame even worse than generation five did, then the best thing that any of us could do as intelligent consumers is to just not buy it.

Buying something and then complaining about it doesn't do very much good, because you've already given the producer your money, and unless you've bought a product from an extremely altruistic company, your complaints won't carry much weight.

Until they unveiled the mega evolutions, I was going to pre-order the game and buy myself a 3DS for it. Now I'm starting to feel like I should just skip it, because they don't seem to give a damn about important things like balance and power creep.

It doesn't seem like it, and I'm starting to think that more people should be kind of worried or unhappy.

So far, the only pokemon that have them are pokemon that don't need them, because they're already pretty strong (somewhere near OU or in ubers) and pokemon that need a regular, permanent evolution (in order to give them better stats and a wider movepool) instead of something temporary that would occur only in battle (Mawile and maybe Kangaskhan and Ampharos).

So, if this trend continues, I can only infer that gamefreak is hellbent on making balance issues even worse, and that I should not buy the game.

Does anybody else here feel even remotely like this, or are you all mindless consumers of videogame media?

Firstly the game isn't built to be balanced AT ALL. Not even a little. It's just not even a thought on the drawing board and never has been. Have you not noticed that we don't play any Pokemon games straight out of the box as is? That would be chaos and just awful going all the way back to gen 1. Balance went out the door the second they created Mewtwo.

Secondly, Mewtwo/Blaziken and to a much lesser extent Lucario are the only things that have them right now that might not "need" them. The game needed something to spice it up and frankly they hit a home run with this because it's appealing from a competitive standpoint as well as an aesthetic and just all around awesomeness standpoint.

The event is based on the Japanese show Pokemon Smash, and unless I'm mistaken, those Pokemon are often featured on the show, sometimes as people dressed up in costumes. The selection of Pokemon likely means nothing in regard to MEvos.

If generation six makes the metagame even worse than generation five did, then the best thing that any of us could do as intelligent consumers is to just not buy it.

Buying something and then complaining about it doesn't do very much good, because you've already given the producer your money, and unless you've bought a product from an extremely altruistic company, your complaints won't carry much weight.

Until they unveiled the mega evolutions, I was going to pre-order the game and buy myself a 3DS for it. Now I'm starting to feel like I should just skip it, because they don't seem to give a damn about important things like balance and power creep.

Firstly the game isn't built to be balanced AT ALL. Not even a little. It's just not even a thought on the drawing board and never has been. Have you not noticed that we don't play any Pokemon games straight out of the box as is? That would be chaos and just awful going all the way back to gen 1. Balance went out the door the second they created Mewtwo.

Secondly, Mewtwo/Blaziken and to a much lesser extent Lucario are the only things that have them right now that might not "need" them. The game needed something to spice it up and frankly they hit a home run with this because it's appealing from a competitive standpoint as well as an aesthetic and just all around awesomeness standpoint.

By "balanced", I mean that there should be a certain amount of equality between certain groups of Pokemon in terms of stats, moves, abilities, and type relationships.

If game was built without any regard to balance, then why did they nerf the accuracy of Dark Void? Why did they even bother making a new type that resists and is super-effective against dragon types? Hell, why did they ever do anything with the types after generation one if balance didn't matter?

Balance does matter, especially for the competitive side of the game. Thus, we have several different "plateaus" of average pokemon strength, represented by Smogon's tiers.

If Smogon's "analytical department" has to keep making tiers because the pokemon that come out keep getting stronger while the rest are left behind, there is a problem with the balance of the game and it should be obvious that power creep is at hand and needs to be resolved somehow.

So here's the deal.
For a long time, the game has been set up to be balanced for gameplay purposes. Any game that's made to be fair when you're fighting a computer is always easy to break when put into the hands of competitors, just look at story-driven MMOs. Each character does a good enough job on its own when doing dungeon runs, but the characters are often tiered in PvP because some have combos and/or special attacks that are simply more functional than others when it's your skills vs another person. If Pokémon were a game where we fought against another live person every time we battled, they would have a very different schedule for playtesting because they wouldn't want certain characters/monsters to be more generally advantageous in battle than others.

Battling is only a small portion of what Pokémon truly is. Pokémon is one of the few games that encourages you to continuously collect new characters to fight with. If every situation in RBGY could be handled with a Bulbasaur and a Mankey, then there'd be no point in learning about all the other Pokémon out there. Pokémon that you see early on aren't going to be as powerful as late-game Pokémon, and they justify that by having experience yields, BSTs, rarity, exclusivity, type commodities, and more set in their programming because they wanted things to continuously balance out as you played. They want to keep the spirit of continuous balance based on progress intact by introducing their new game mechanics.

It's complicated, but the point I want to make is, maybe they're looking to cater towards the metagame a little more. However, they also want to provide new, fresh ideas that they hope will make a major change to the way we play, because the game as a whole would go stale if they created a bunch of new evolutions, effectively making the Kalos region "Gen IV 2, Electric Boogaloo". They're really trying to have it all.

Until they unveiled the mega evolutions, I was going to pre-order the game and buy myself a 3DS for it. Now I'm starting to feel like I should just skip it, because they don't seem to give a damn about important things like balance and power creep.

Mega evolutions are the perfect balancing tool, I don't get what people are mad about. There was already a massive power creep in gen 5, leaving many older pokes in the dust. With mega evos, you can get pokes who can't evolve any more a new lease on life. They're limited, as in once per battle, so they won't overrun the meta. IT also means that eventually, they could potentially add more than one mega evo to a pokemon. For instance if they do keep making stronger and stronger pokes, maybe they just give a different mega evo to a pokemon, just by giving a different stone. So we could have mega lucario fighting forme, mega lucario steel forme, etc.

Mega evolutions are the perfect balancing tool, I don't get what people are mad about. There was already a massive power creep in gen 5, leaving many older pokes in the dust. With mega evos, you can get pokes who can't evolve any more a new lease on life. They're limited, as in once per battle, so they won't overrun the meta. IT also means that eventually, they could potentially add more than one mega evo to a pokemon. For instance if they do keep making stronger and stronger pokes, maybe they just give a different mega evo to a pokemon, just by giving a different stone. So we could have mega lucario fighting forme, mega lucario steel forme, etc.

It doesn't seem like it, and I'm starting to think that more people should be kind of worried or unhappy.

So far, the only pokemon that have them are pokemon that don't need them, because they're already pretty strong (somewhere near OU or in ubers) and pokemon that need a regular, permanent evolution (in order to give them better stats and a wider movepool) instead of something temporary that would occur only in battle (Mawile and maybe Kangaskhan and Ampharos).

So, if this trend continues, I can only infer that gamefreak is hellbent on making balance issues even worse, and that I should not buy the game.

Does anybody else here feel even remotely like this, or are you all mindless consumers of videogame media?

Mega evolutions are the perfect balancing tool, I don't get what people are mad about. There was already a massive power creep in gen 5, leaving many older pokes in the dust. With mega evos, you can get pokes who can't evolve any more a new lease on life. They're limited, as in once per battle, so they won't overrun the meta. IT also means that eventually, they could potentially add more than one mega evo to a pokemon. For instance if they do keep making stronger and stronger pokes, maybe they just give a different mega evo to a pokemon, just by giving a different stone. So we could have mega lucario fighting forme, mega lucario steel forme, etc.

Yeah, but giving mega evolutions to pokemon that are already really powerful only worsens the power creep problem.

Also, it will overrun/over-centralize the metagame, because all you would really need to do is "mega-evolve" and then sweep with something like Mega Lucario; this will result in an increased use of moves like Knock Off, Thief, and Trick, because everybody will be busy trying to stop each other from mega-evolving.

I know that some of the people here play or used to play some kind of TCG. I used to play Yu-Gi-Oh!, and this is exactly what happened whenever a powerful new group of cards was introduced. They would announce them in the Japanese shonen jump, and then everybody would obsess over them until they got here, and within a week or two of release (if the card(s) really were strong) everybody would be playing with the powerful new card(s), and everybody who wasn't was playing decks that tried to thwart the powerful new card(s).

Competitive pokemon is essentially just a TCG with a deck size of six "cards" and very infrequent releases of new "cards". If pokemon like Mega Lucario become popular, you can be sure that everybody who isn't using them will be trying to make sure that they never mega-evolve to begin with, and thus the metagame will become over-centralized.

As for new evolutions, not all pokemon (who don't already have three) need more of them. Ditto doesn't, Smeargle doesn't, and there are many others that do not need an evolution from a thematic standpoint. Lapras doesn't really have anywhere else to go, in terms of concept. What would you do, give it more horns? Give it wings? It's already big enough and "developed-looking" enough that giving it another evolution doesn't make sense (Lapras could use a few more point in some of its base stats, but that's another topic). Having separate mega evolutions that are like new "formes" doesn't make sense either, because things that could use split evolutions would be better off with a split evolution, since it would be permanent.

Lucario is the absolute last pokemon that needs anything else done to it in terms of more evolutions or forms.

But the problem is that the "battling side" is growing larger and larger, while the "story side" is staying the same (in terms of the relative amount of the game that each "side" takes up).

The other problem is that the story is still somewhat lacking in terms of challenge for older or more discerning players. It's gotten better in the more recent generations, but the single player portions still feel kind of like busywork to do until I get to the endgame stuff where I have access to every item, pokemon, and TM and can just sit back and breed strong pokemon for battle frontier stuff and online battles.

Also, it wouldn't be hard to make the selection of pokemon synergize better with both the battling and the story parts of the game. The single-player portion needs weak pokemon near the beginning of the game, and yet competitive play (or even just "serious" battling with human opponents) tends to exclude pokemon without a certain base stat total, unless they have a special niche. The solution is to reduce the gap in base stat totals, so that the difference between the lowest and the highest is about 175-200 instead of the 300 or so it is now.

That way, there would still be a gradient of pokemon strengths available for the single-player mode, but many more pokemon would be viable in the competitive scene, and Smogon wouldn't have to make up as many tiers to house them all, because battling would be mostly up to player skill instead of being mostly up to the base stats of the pokemon used (basically, imagine if there were only NFE, UU, OU and Uber - there would be far more pokemon in the middle two tiers, and pokemon in BL would ideally be brought into OU or UU).

Mega evolutions for pokemon that are already pretty strong don't make sense, and the pokemon that could use a mega evolution would be much better off with either a permanent linear evolution (such as Mawile evolving permanently into another pokemon) or a horizontal/split evolution (like Kirlia > Gardevoir/Gallade)